Just started re-watching the first season and finally saw the pilot episode, amazing. It is crazy how many subtle things you miss the first time through, some interesting Kubrick references. I still have not seen the second season but never really hear anything about it good or bad. I just recently purchased the definitive gold box edition which has both seasons and what seems like enough extras to last me the entire summer. Anyone else have this set? Is there anything that is a most see on it?

I still have not seen the second season but never really hear anything about it good or bad.

There are 22 episodes in the season, and the only ones I remember really liking/loving were the 4 Lynch-directed episodes. Otherwise, Season 2 is a harrowing journey of endless bad decisions, unenjoyable camp, and general creative collapse.

Definitely. Some people like it, but most of those people also acknowledge its badness and love it anyway. I unfortunately could never appreciate the camp, because I think it fails even in that goal. (We have a marquee on this topic. One of us should dig through the FTP and drag it out.)

It gets really bad when they try to do noir (and they do try, very very hard). It just fails. You have these random characters trying to be dark and mysterious, but they just end up looking stupid. Especially the blonde woman with enormous shoulderpads (spoiler).

Oh and something I forgot to mention in this thread... Perhaps the worst thing about Season 2 is the music. It's not that it's bad music, it's that they use the same 2 cuts and repeat them over and over again. The only explanation I can come up with is that Angelo Badalamenti quit and took everything with him, but accidentally left 5 minutes of music behind, so they went with that for the remainder of the series.

Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost appears to have put an end to the latest flurry of Internet rumors surrounding the resurrection of David Lynch’s seriously weird but beloved cult series. On Dec. 31, an anonymous poster on the 4chan message board, wrote of attending a meeting between Lynch and NBC executives about bringing back a number of the original characters for a third season of the show, which originally aired on ABC from April 1990 to June 1991.

The tipster claimed that the idea was in the “early stages” and that NBC executives were a “little on edge” about Lynch “tackling [the series] alone” given the Eraserhead director’s iconoclastic tastes. According to Anonymous, Lynch discussed setting the new season in the modern day, with good Agent Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) stuck in the lodge and bad Cooper in jail. This time, a young female reporter will purportedly “uncover the truth” behind such conundrums as the killer BOB and the Lodge that defies time and space.

At the time, those little morsels of unsubstantiated rumor didn’t seem so far-fetched given a report on Moviehole.com in which Frost was quote saying that a season-three storyline is “something we talk about from time to time… If we ever do decide to move forward, I know we have a rich trove to draw from. Cast and crew members, such as the series’ “Log Lady,” Catherine E. Coulson and writer/producer Robert Engels, have also reportedly been contacted about the possibility of resuming their roles.

Alas, on Wednesday Frost tweeted the following, which appeared to debunk the rumors:

Mark Frost@mfrost11 Dear Internet: You are very good at spreading rumors. Truth is more valuable and much harder to come by. Sincerely yours, @mfrost112 Jan 13Daily Beast West Coast Deputy Bureau Chief Jace Lacob also tweeted that, in an email, Frost indicated that he and Lynch had had no contact with NBC.

BringBackTwinPeaks! @TwinPeaksRedux3 Jan 13@televisionary what did he say in the email? We were the first to break this fascination story and all hell broke loose! Jace Lacob@televisionary @TwinPeaksRedux That there have been no conversations between them (i.e., Frost and Lynch) and NBC.3 Jan 13What is there to do but grab piece of cherry pie and exit stage left with my favorite reaction from the Twin Peaks Archive Twitter feed, where much of this drama has been playing out:

Twin Peaks@TwinPeaksArchve It is not happening again. We all need a cold shower.

Logged

“Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” - Andy Warhol

I'm getting rid of a bunch of DVDs, including hard-to-find (bootleg) copies of David Lynch and Mark Frost's other, less successful TV shows Hotel Room and On The Air. I've also got DVDs of two Lynch documentaries Pretty As A Picture and Lynch (One).

I don't think it's fair to slam off much off the stories of season 2 today. Remember, this series is over 20 years old!!!! I remember some of those were great back then. Windom Earle/Donna's father/Owl Cave/Annie/Eckhardt - all of these were really good stories 20+ years ago - we are just so spoiled with today, we can't apperciate what it was back then. FFS: Twin Peaks was TV's landing on the moon!!!!!!!! I actually remember people saying X-Files was almost a copy of Twin Peaks......That is the same as white people meeting black people for the first time, and they're saying: "They all look the same!"

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me Is David Lynch's MasterpieceSource: Village Voice

Few films lend themselves to critical reevaluation as well as David Lynch's much-maligned Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Booed at its premiere at Cannes in 1992 (and playing at BAM as part of their "Booed at Cannes" series, which runs through May 23), eviscerated by the popular press during its brief theatrical run later that year, and remembered now with bafflement and contempt, the film's reception and legacy might best be characterized by the infamous words of sworn Lynch defender Quentin Tarantino, memorialized in an interview with Elia Taylor that year: "David Lynch had disappeared so far up his own ass that I have no desire to see another David Lynch movie."

It's not hard to understand the enduring distaste. Fire Walk With Me is deliberately oblique, even by Lynch standards, asking questions without answers and providing clues to no mystery. Its narrative is split in two, seemingly without reason, a division introduced when our hero is apparently swallowed up by a gaping hole in the center of the picture (a hole he finds beneath a parked RV in America's least inviting trailer park, naturally).

Most gallingly, especially for audiences circa '92, the film purports to be a prequel to perhaps the most beloved cult television series of the decade, though in truth it's more interested in systematically dismantling the mythos and iconography of Twin Peaks than in pandering to the show's fanbase with some feature-length trip down TV-memory lane. The film is alarmingly dark. It isn't especially funny, or quirky, or even much in keeping with the spirit of the series. But in its own singular, deeply strange way, Fire Walk With Me is David Lynch's masterpiece.

It helps to think about genre. Like the series, the film plays in pastiche. Adopting conventions from the police procedural, daytime soap operas, post-war noir, and 1950s melodrama, Fire Walk With Me is a postmodern hybrid in flux, its style ever-drifting and its formal makeup a composite of self-conscious clichés. The purpose of all this appropriation, however, isn't merely to ironize outmoded forms or tropes—as it often is in the work of the Coen brothers—but to embrace those antiquated modes and deploy those old-fashioned tropes in earnest. The film uses melodrama, in particular, to replicate the function and goal of the genre: targeting the veneer of sanctity in the middle-class American home and exposing its hypocrisy and corruption.

If Fire Walk With Me seems like a nightmare, it's the same one reflected in James Mason's descent into suburban madness in Nicholas Ray's classic melodrama Bigger Than Life. And what's scary is that the nightmare is real. Fantasy was always a central, if only implied, component of the classical melodrama, animating the social aspirations and wish-fulfillment of a rising class founded on subjugation and fear. The melodrama sought to undermine the contradictions inherent in an imagined good life, its stories essentially bourgeois dreams inflated to grotesque proportions.

Lynch has worked with this sort of material before. His early coup Blue Velvet, devised as a kind of distorted TV soap, dug up a small town's sordid secrets, suggesting that all seemingly good things have a dark side. But Fire Walk With Me taps into something considerably more terrifying: not only the evil buried somewhere in the quintessential middle-class family, but the evil buried somewhere in all of us, and our capacity for it.

Admirers of Twin Peaks were no doubt disillusioned by this shift toward cynicism. But an important part of what makes Fire Walk With Me so arresting is how it simultaneously reflects and distorts the series. Far from filling out a story or answering lingering questions, is to restore a sort of innocence lost, commendably endowing the show's principal victim, Laura Palmer, with a voice with which to speak for herself. Twin Peaks was defined, more than anything else, by Laura's pointed absence; Fire Walk With Me is defined by her presence, vivid and terrified and alone. The film offers us an opportunity to experience firsthand a character who had existed through the series only as a recreated fantasy, an imagined emblem of innocence and suffering who, like Otto Preminger's Laura, could only be obsessed over in death. In doing so, the film suggests that the pain endured in her life was more important than the intrigue surrounding her death, and we instead come to know not the mystery of what happened by the tragedy of why it did.

And so Laura is present in a film about loss. "For a long time you wouldn't feel anything," she says, describing what it might be like to fall through space. "Then you'd burst into fire forever. And the angels wouldn't help you, because all of the angels are gone." Though we do occasionally catch glimpses of those who would try to help her—most of whom, like Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle Mclaughlin), can only do so after she's gone—Laura's sense of resignation is correct. Her fate is sealed. Fire Walk With Me is a prequel to a series whose very concept is the death of the film's hero, which makes its ending a done deal before it even begins. Instead of a struggle against death, Laura's journey here is one of realization and, finally, resignation, not only of what will become of her but of what she's been enduring her entire life—sexual abuse at the hands of her father, Leland. Our knowledge of Laura's fate eliminates any classical suspense, leaving us only with sadness: The film becomes the memorialization of a tragedy already confirmed.

Fire Walk With Me takes the show's loose cluster of supernatural phenomena and reconfigures them as a vulnerable mind's imagined demons, a coping strategy for trauma. If the series is about hunting a literal demon—BOB, a gray-haired man who is said to "possess" Leland Palmer—the film is about realizing that the demon is real. Though in a way these fantastic elements were its bread and butter, the series ultimately suffered, emotionally, by "explaining away" the trauma of Laura's death and by assigning Leland's evil to his demonic alter ego. But the film returns us from fantasy to reality, reasserting the evil in the man himself: Laura's death at the hands of her father becomes a tragedy localized in a recognizable world rather than one happening in the fantasy of fiction. The fantasy becomes figural. A history of sexual abuse becomes real.

Lil (Kimberly Ann Cole) is the central element of the film's first half: Cole (Lynch)'s "mother's sister's girl," offering deliberately inscrutable signs for the pleasure of our confusion. It's Lynch's way of signaling that there will be no easy answers: we're about to witness a tragedy unfold without explanation, horrors happening that we can't justify or explain. Laura's world is morally confused, and Lynch presents it as basically illegible: the only way he can show us the truth is by articulating it in code, shrouding it in fantasy and mystery and conspiratorial intrigue. It's why the film seems, at times, like a puzzle. The contrasting halves of the film's bifurcated narrative find two worlds crashing together, the first a plane of frustrated desire and inscrutable mystery, the second a void into which a young woman is swallowed up. The procedural elements of the first are fundamentally disconnected from the tragedy of the second, suggesting that, in the final estimation, we can't really on institutions to protect us. They're solving the wrong case.

Logged

“Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” - Andy Warhol

DAVID LYNCH IS FILMING 'TWIN PEAKS' AGAIN, IN FITTING WITH THE SERIES' END

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Are you ready to get weird again? Because David Lynch is ready to get weird (continuously). In that he seems to be gearing up to film more Twin Peaks. So there’s that. Are you ready? We’re not sure if we’re ready. In the finale episode of Twin Peaks Laura Palmer tells Kyle MacLachlan’s Special Agent Dale Cooper that she will see him again in 25 years. That series was set in 1989 (though it aired ‘90-‘91), so 25 five years from then is…well, right about now. 2014, to be exact, so in fact it’s exactly now. Oh god. What does it mean.

For now it means that David Lynch is totally filming new Twin Peaks footage. There’s a casting call and everything! It includes the term “HOT Caucasian girl,” which is a term that should at once be used all the time and never ever again. Via Sande Alessi Casting and Welcome To Twin Peaks, here’s the call itself:

It's cruel to tease like that. You should have said in your post that it's probably just a Twin Peaks promo. Since the casting call is literally called "Twin Peaks Promo." Still kind of exciting, though.